We all love solder paste reflow soldering. Of course we do: its the fastest way to solder boards and can also be used to produce more than one of them. But getting stencils has been a pain: smtstencil.co.uk sells them for 20€ and a week of waiting. A bit too much for playing around. And I broke couple of school's endmills trying to mill out stencils so no more of that.

A week ago Kalle showed me a blog post about cutting stencils with plotter. So I have a plotting machine now. Cuts pretty stencils from polyester sheets. KiCad exports SVG files that is useable with minimal modification. Polyester stencils are transparent - aligning is easy even without aligning holes. It is strong enough so I can use it more times than I ever will. Also it it soft enough to modify it with scalpel.